NEW ORLEANS — In case the message didn’t come through loud and clear during Day 1 of Sun Belt Football Media Days on Tuesday, Sun Belt Conference Commissioner Keith Gill is bullish on his league.
And why not?
Sun Belt football is at an all-time high after the 2022 season continued the league’s meteoric ascension among the FBS’ non-autonomy conferences over the past half-decade.
The league’s top three teams combined for 31 wins and a 31-9 record, reigning conference champion Troy enters the 2023 season with the nation’s second-longest winning streak behind national champion Georgia and those Trojans made last year’s final College Football Playoff rankings—the fourth year in a row that the Sun Belt has had a team in the CFP’s final listing.
“The Sun Belt is rising,” Gill told the assembled media and school staffers Tuesday at the Media Days headquarter Sheraton New Orleans Hotel. “As we celebrate football, it’s obvious that the Sun Belt Conference has never been better.”
The Sun Belt is in its second year with an expanded membership, one year after the league added James Madison, Marshall, Old Dominion and Southern Miss to its roster. Two of those schools were among the league’s all-time record seven participants in Bowl Season at the end of the 2022 campaign.
"Last year we welcomed four new members into the Sun Belt, along with our members at the time expressing their 100 percent commitment to the conference,” Gill said. “We now have 14 schools in 10 contiguous states, and this commitment and these additions resulted in what may have been the best season in the history of Sun Belt football.”
“The carefully constructed design of the Sun Belt has paid dividends on the field and with college football fans,” Gill added, citing the fact that 35 million people watched Sun Belt football on television last year, almost a 100 percent increase over 2021.
That’s not just bragging or hyperbole, and it’s a lot more than just an increase in eyeballs watching the league on its long-time partner ESPN’s linear and streaming platforms.
“We’ve said it before and it’s the truth, we are the premier Group of Five conference in all of college football,” said second-year Troy head coach Jon Sumrall, whose Trojans (12-2 in 2022) were picked to repeat as Sun Belt West Division champions—albeit by a narrow margin over in-state rival South Alabama (10-3 in 2022).
“It’s not arguably any more, it’s factually, the best Group of Five conference in America,” said Arkansas State head coach Butch Jones, entering his third season with the Red Wolves. He’s seen first-hand how good the Sun Belt has become, with the conference boasting multiple 10-win teams for five-straight seasons. Since 2020 only 10 FBS programs have won more than 75 percent of their games. Four of the nation’s conferences have two each out of those 10—the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Sun Belt.
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“In Week 1 and 2 last year, Old Dominion beat Virginia Tech, Marshall won on the road at Notre Dame, App State won at Texas A&M and Georgia Southern won at Nebraska,” Gill said. “The Sun Belt had a more than 50 percent increase in representation on All-America teams along with that record number of teams participating in postseason bowl games.”
Following Troy’s 45-26 win over Coastal Carolina in the Hercules Tires Sun Belt Football Championship Game—the home team is unbeaten in the five-year history of the league title game—three Sun Belt teams won bowl games. That included No. 24-ranked Troy, who beat Conference USA champion and No. 25-ranked UTSA 18-12 in the Duluth Trading Cure Bowl—last year’s only bowl game that featured two conference champions. Only the SEC, ACC, Big Ten and Big 12 had more bowl participants than the Sun Belt.
The numbers helped the league maintain its spot as the most successful postseason league in the FBS since the dawn of the College Football Playoff in 2014, with a .614 bowl winning percentage.
Gill said the conference maintains its tie-ins with five bowl games—the R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl (Dec. 16, New Orleans, La.), the 68 Ventures Bowl (Dec. 23, Mobile, Ala.), the Camellia Bowl (Dec. 23, Montgomery, Ala.), the Cure Bowl (Dec. 16, Orlando, Fla.) and the Myrtle Beach Bowl (Dec. 18, Conway, S.C.). He added that the league is pursuing other bowl agreements.
“The CFP is our ultimate goal each year, but our conference bowl partners are key to our success as a football league,” he said. “We continue to explore options to expand our number of bowl partners to accommodate our rising success on the field. We will look to add two to three primary bowls in the not-too-distant future and will continue to work with the NCAA to expand our opportunities to engage with primary bowl partners before the end of the current bowl cycle.”
The seven teams in the West Division were featured on Day 1 of Sun Belt Football Media Days on Tuesday. Troy and South Alabama—which lost a tough 10-6 October contest to the Trojans that kept the Jaguars out of the title game—were picked first and second in the Sun Belt Conference Football Preseason Coaches Poll, but four-time West Division champion Louisiana and Southern Miss, which went from 3-9 to 7-6 last year and beat Rice in the Lending Tree Bowl, were not far behind.
The seven East Division teams will take the stage on Wednesday with head coaches and two student-athletes from each school taking part. The event will be broadcast for the second-straight day on ESPN+ with a morning session from 9:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. CT and an afternoon session from 1:30-4:00 p.m. CT live from the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel.
